


The Private Space

by madamebadger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alien Culture, Early Relationship, F/M, Morning Sex, Sleeping Together, moderately fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 22:27:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1202845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sleeping together turns out to be more logistically difficult than Shepard would have expected.  Not <i>sex</i>, that was pretty straightforward, but sleeping together. Nevertheless, she's up to the challenge... and it's definitely worth the work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Private Space

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a writing exercise, but one I liked enough to actually finish and post. Set during Lair of the Shadow Broker.

All the research that Shepard had done on relationships with turians had emphasized the cultural differences (turians didn’t approach sexual relationships in the same way that humans—or, for that matter, asari—did) and the physiological differences (rough plates, bony protrusions, and violent allergic reactions could put a real crimp in your sex life). Shepard didn’t find any of those particularly difficult to navigate. She’d practically made a career out of navigating alien cultural differences by _talking about things_ , and this was no different. And the physical hurdles to sex could be sorted out if you tried hard enough.

It never in a thousand years would have occurred to her that the problem would come up when it came to sharing a bed. Apparently the real trick was not cultural differences or physiological differences but furniture differences.

“How the hell are you supposed to get comfortable on a bed like this?” Garrus pressed the palm of his hand into the mattress, expression one of consternation. “It’s got almost no give at all.”

They’d spent the night together before, of course, before Omega 4. But not _sleeping_. There hadn’t been much time, and between the first time (slowly figuring each other out), and the talking, and the second time (mind-meltingly, astonishingly good), there hadn’t been much time for sleep. Since then it had been stolen hours without the luxury of a whole night. But tonight, finally, they’d found time for the pleasure of spending the night together after sex, and….

Shepard looked at him helplessly. It felt really strange to be discussing the bedding while completely naked and sex-tousled. “It’s actually kind of squashy, by my standards.”

“…Seriously?”

“’Fraid so.”

Garrus kicked the rumpled bedclothes out of the way, making Shepard briefly thankful for the expensive microfiber sheets that could resist the sharp claws on his toes. He turned over and rested for a moment on his back, head lolling at a clearly-uncomfortable angle. Then he rolled to one side, then the other (he looked for all the world like a turtle trying to right itself), and finally onto his belly. He paused there and sighed, the sound muffled in the pillows.

“No luck?” Shepard asked, rubbing the back of his neck. He shook his head without raising it, fringe tilting side to side. “What’s a turian bed look like, anyway?”

He pushed himself to his knees. “You didn’t even do _that_ much research?”

“Hey! I was busy. Besides, I was distracted researching other things.” Her fingertips slid up his inner thigh. 

Garrus purred, and then laughed. “Tempted as I am, if we don’t get at least a few hours’ sleep we’ll be useless tomorrow, and—”

“—tomorrow we pay a visit to the Shadow Broker,” Shepard finished, and sighed. “Yeah, I know, we should be responsible. Anyway, you didn’t answer the question.”

“It’s….” Garrus began, and then reached to the side table “…easier to show. Here.” He reached for his omnitool where he’d left it on the bedside table and called up an image.

It took a moment to even recognize that the bed _was_ a bed. It was a high-sided narrow bowl, similar to a deep bathtub, lined with what looked like dozens of pillows—and with nothing whatsoever resembling a mattress or, for that matter, blankets. “How do you lie down in that?” she asked, after a moment.

“You don’t,” Garrus said, “that’s kind of the point. You sit up or crouch and put the pillows all around you to support you and keep you warm. In the field we use a kind of foam that packs flat instead of pillows.” He thumped his cowl and then gestured at his arm-spines, hip-spurs, leg-spurs. “It’s not exactly easy to lie down in any position with these.” 

“I… see.”

He gave her a brows-raised look. “Where exactly did you think I was sleeping in the battery?”

“I thought you were hiding a cot somewhere. Behind the pillows.” She gave him an exasperated look. “How was I supposed to know that the pillows _were_ the cot?” (In truth, he’d asked whether it was acceptable to bunk down in the main battery and she’d agreed without thinking about it much, confident that he could sort it out for himself. Which was apparently true, just not like she’d imagined.)

He laughed, then sighed and set aside his omnitool. “I’d really rather stay here, but I don’t know exactly how to make this work.”

“How do turians who partner with asari manage? I know asari sleep in beds.”

“Really squashy beds and lots of pillows,” Garrus said.

Shepard sat up on her knees. She didn’t want him to go back to his not-cot in the battery; she wanted him to stay, so strongly that it surprised her. And she could think her way through a difficult situation, couldn’t she? “I have an idea,” she said. “Lie down. On your side.”

The look he gave her was profoundly dubious. “It’s not just that it’s uncomfortable, Shepard. If I sleep like that I’ll probably damage my neck.”

“Trust me,” she said, and he gave her a long, quiet look, and then wordlessly did so. (She felt a secret flush of heat, at that.)

She tucked two pillows under his head, to prop it up to the level of his cowl. One more under his waist (and he hissed—half-ticklish, half-aroused) to take the strain off his hip-spurs. Another carefully between his knees to keep his leg-spurs from rubbing against each other and chafing.

She settled back to sit on her heels. “There,” she said. “How’s that?”

“Well,” he drawled. “If I don’t move at all, I’ll be fine.”

She smacked him with the remaining pillow—a clearly unexpected attack, leaving him spluttering.

“Real mature, Shepard,” Garrus said, once he’d recovered from stealthy pillow-attack. “Real, _real_ mature.”

“Uh huh,” she said, curling up spoon-style against him.

He nuzzled the top of her head, mandibles flaring and catching on her hair. “Fortunately, I like aggressive women.”

“I know,” she said, and smiled, and relaxed into his embrace, and into sleep.

***

Shepard woke before the alarm, before EDI’s wake-up message, before everything. She lay still in the darkness. Garrus’ arm remained draped over her, and only the flickering blue of the mass arrays visible through her skylight lit the room.

Garrus murmured into her hair and his thumb rubbed a circle on her stomach. “You awake?”

“Yeah,” she said, licking sleep-dry lips. “Did I wake you?”

“Nah, I’ve been awake for an hour.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

There was a brief, confused pause. “…No?”

Shepard reached over, scrabbled for her omnitool, and turned on the clock function. As she’d suspected, she’d only been asleep for five hours. Her wakeup was listed for five-thirty. “You only slept four hours?”

“…Yes?” Another laugh, nuzzling into her hair. “Turians don’t knock out for six to eight hours at a stretch like humans or asari. Didn’t you do _any_ research?”

She rolled over and ran a fingertip down his mandible. In the half-light from the mass effect field, he was all darkness and light, silver and shadow. “All right, fill me in, Mister Research.”

“We sleep four hours or so, and then make up the rest with naps.” He stroked her hip. “Honestly, I think it’s a little strange that you lose consciousness for a full third of your day at a time.”

“You didn’t have to stay in bed for an hour just because I was asleep.”

He slid his hand up her side to stroke through her hair, that gentle touch with just a pleasant hint of scratching behind it from the edges of his talons. “Maybe I wanted to,” he said.

She leaned forward to kiss him, feeling the pleasant flex of his mouth-plates, the whisper-faint touch of his mandibles on her cheeks. So close, he smelled of polished leather and hot tin and, weirdly, crushed cardamom pods. She wondered what she smelled like to him. Kiss, and kiss, and kiss again—and the brush of his tongue, his taste alien beyond her ability to analogize. 

“We’ve got half an hour,” she murmured against his mouth when he broke the kiss, and she felt his smile in the changed angle of his mandibles against her face.

He rolled her onto her back and then moved over her—discarding the pillows stuck in his cowl and his hip-spurs and between his knees as he went, which made her laugh out loud. She thought about turning on the light, because she loved to see him… but there was something about the slow sleepy quiet of the darkened room that stopped her. In half an hour they’d put on the lights, clean themselves up, get into their armor, and go out to a do battle on a hilariously supervillain-ish hidden base in the middle of a millenniums-long electrical storm. But for now, here, in the warm dark privacy of her bed, they didn’t have to think about any of that.

She left the light off.

Garrus leaned over her, kissing her again, and she bent her knees and spread them so he could lie comfortably between her legs. Her thighs rubbed the shockingly soft skin of his waist, and he growled into her mouth and caught her lip between his mouthplates—an almost-bite safer than an actual bite with his serrated teeth. And maybe she was weird or kinky for aliens or maybe it was just _Garrus_ because the completely inhuman texture of his plates against her breasts—not quite rough, not quite smooth, more like the texture of brushed steel than anything else, but far more warm and pliant than steel—thrilled heat through her, flushed her and slicked her between her legs, made her gasp into his mouth.

They didn’t speak, which was unusual; the other times they’d spoken a lot. But she felt in some unnameable way that speaking would break the spell just like turning on the lights would.

He licked her throat, his long tongue flickering, as at the same time he slid a hand between their bodies and stroked between her legs. His fingertips were softer and more sensitive than the rest of him, soft as fine suede, and he rubbed along her inner lips and then up to her clit. She arched, body bridging under him, biting her lip to keep from crying out as he circled, slow, slow, slow.

She dug the fingers of one hand into his cowl, the other into the sheets. Her breath came shorter and faster as the sensations shot through her, smooth arcs of pleasure at first and then more jagged as she came closer and closer to the peak. A muscle twitched in her leg, she dug her fingers so tight into the sheets that she nearly wrenched them free from the bed, and then—

—he stopped, and she almost swore aloud, and felt him rumble with amusement and pleasure both. But she didn’t have time to complain because he spread her legs further apart and sank into her, slow and easy and deep and so good that this time she _did_ cry out. Slick though she was she could feel each ridge pushing into her.

He moved steadily and languorously inside her. No fast pace this time, but a speed more in line with sleepy morning sex, with sex that followed a night spent curled up together. Even though this day was likely to be as dangerous as the ones that had come before it, it was sex that said: we don’t have to rush, we have time, there will be other times. She wrapped her legs around his waist and felt his rumble of pleasure at the feeling of her slick thighs against the sensitive unplated skin there, gripped his cowl and held on, undulated beneath him as slow and deep as the sea. In the quiet and the dark with nothing between them but the sound of skin on skin and the whisper of the sheets and all the stars above through the skylight, she couldn’t have said how long it lasted, a heartbeat or a century.

His mouth found hers in the dark. His mandibles brushed her throat, feather-light, another caress. His tongue brushed hers, so alien, so familiar, and she felt and tasted and breathed his growl—and with that her orgasm took her by surprise, caught her and pulled her helplessly down like strong undertow. She moaned aloud and arched beneath his weight, stunned and held in the dark. Garrus panted against her throat, his breath hot, his thrusts growing ragged, and then the sensation—alien but growing more familiar—of his ridges swelling inside her with his own climax.

They panted together for a while before separating, Garrus sliding to his side and rubbing her sweaty back. “Sleep well?” he murmured.

She laughed, heard her own voice throaty and relaxed. “Yeah, you?”

“Better than I ever could have expected,” he said, dipping his head to look her in the eye, in the silver-blue half-light, and she knew that he wasn’t just talking about the bed situation. And she didn’t know what to say to that, how to respond, still so early in their relationship—still so undefined and fragile a relationship—so she pulled him down to touch her forehead to his, the affectionate gesture of his own species, the sharing of gaze and breath.

“Me too,” she said, into the private space between them.


End file.
